Thursday, May 10, 2012

Varnish-Joomla patch upgraded to 1.2.1

Varnish integration for Joomla! CMS is our solution for websites based on Joomla which have many page visits by anonymous users. It allows owners to serve even hundreds times more traffic without investing in hardware. Should I mention that it makes Joomla! fast, too?

One of our customers, Free Speaker Plans, was experiencing some issues with the patch he purchased from us. After a quick debugging session, it looked like forum software was not compatible with the patch. So I've modified the patch and now the forum component may run unmodified. If you've purchased an older version and have trouble running Kunena Forum, upgrade now!

At this point, I'd like to thank the webmaster of Free Speaker Plans for patiently testing my subsequent attempts at fixing the problem and providing rich feedback. Thank you!

Technical list of changes:

  • Support for Joomla < 2.5.4 has been abandoned

  • Fixed a bug introduced in 1.1, causing that pages calling Jerror::raise() raised a Fatal Error

  • JFactory is now creating a guest JUser object if anonymous session detected (fixes Kunena and possibly other social software)

  • There is no upgrade patch from 1.2 because of numerous Joomla core changes

Monday, May 7, 2012

New server



There was a disk failure on a server serving our customers' virtual private servers. Its disks were not hot swappable, so in an effort to prevent downtime, we're moving to a new server instead of repairing the current one. This was a good opportunity to upgrade the hardware, too. The gigabit network connection is pretty impressive, it downloaded a Linode test file in 1.5 seconds.